Press Releases

Still Point of the Turning World Receives Gold Award.

Amber Lotus Publishing is proud to announce that Still Point of the Turning World: The Life of Gia-fu Feng has received the ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Gold Award for 2009 in the biography category. Award winners were announced at Book-Expo America in New York City this May. In addition to this award, first-time author Carol Ann Wilson has received several notable finalist nominations, namely in the 2010 Next Generation Indie Book Awards, and the 2010 Colorado Authors League Awards.

As an award winner, the book will be featured in the upcoming July/August issue of ForeWord Magazine and will also be highlighted at the American Library Association’s Annual Conference in Washington, D.C., as well as at international book fairs this summer and fall in both Beijing and Frankfurt.

Still Point of the Turning World: The Life of Gia-fu Feng reveals the fascinating journey of a spiritual pilgrim who left his homeland and became a leading light in the East-West cultural synthesis. In this biography, author Carol Ann Wilson provides new insight into the life of rogue Taoist teacher, Gia-fu Feng, his community, and his translations.

With over one million copies sold, Feng’s translation of the Tao Te Ching has become a classic to Tao scholars and enthusiasts.

Amber Lotus has been publishing the work of Gia-fu Feng and his artistic collaborator, Jane English, for nearly a decade. Feng’s translation of Chuang Tsu: Inner Chapters is also available from Amber Lotus.

Still Point of the Turning World: The Life of Gia-fu Feng was released in April 2009.

Amber Lotus Publishing Releases First Biography of Gia-fu Feng, Translator of the Best-Selling Edition of the “Tao Te Ching”

With over one million copies sold, Gia-fu Feng’s translation of the Tao Te Ching has become a classic to Tao scholars and enthusiasts with its familiar, haunting black and white images by Gia-fu’s former wife and artistic collaborator, Jane English. Still Point of the Turning World: The Life of Gia-fu Feng, Author of the best-selling translation of the Tao Te Ching reveals the fascinating journey of a man who left his homeland and began a community of his own. In this new biography, author Carol AnnWilson provides insight into the life of the rogue Taoist teacher, Gia-fu Feng, and his translations.

Born to a wealthy, traditional family in Shanghai, Gia-fu lived through the brutality and unrest of the Chinese Civil War. After leaving his homeland for graduate studies in the United States, he found himself stranded on the other side of the world, far away from a native land which seemed to be crumbling before the world’s eyes.

Landing in the mid-1950s in San Francisco, Gia-fu unexpectedly found a niche with Alan Watts at the American Academy of Asian Studies, a place that allowed him to explore who he was. Thriving amidst the art, music and poetry of the “San Francisco Renaissance,” Gia-fu developed friendships with many of the bohemian locals, including beat poet Jack Kerouac. He helped found the East-West House, a cooperative established to extend the East-meets-West approach of the American Academy of Asian Studies. Within a decade, his path brought him to Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, and the human potential movement of the 1960s.

Alan Watts, Michael Murphy, Dick Price, Fritz Perls, Abraham Maslow and others influenced Gia-fu’s continuing development, just as he contributed to the development of many at Esalen by teaching tai chi, among other roles. He later left Esalen to found his own community, Stillpoint, a group of Taoist families living simply and honestly with each other in nature.

Stillpoint had several iterations, first in Los Gatos, California, and finally in the mountains of Colorado. In the process, a landmark translation of the Chinese classic, Tao Te Ching, done in collaboration with Jane English and the Stillpoint community, brought Gia-fu to the attention of many. His translation of Chuang Tsu: Inner Chapters and years of leading tai chi camps across the world added to the mystique and allure of Gia-fu Feng, Taoist sage and rogue.

Author Carol A. Wilson has spent the last thirteen years researching and writing this biography of Gia-fu Feng. After the untimely death of her sister, who was Gia-fu’s heir, Carol inherited not only Stillpoint, Gia-fu’s Taoist hermitage, but also his 300 pages of jumbled autobiographical writings. She writes, “I never met Gia-fu Feng, nor did I know much about him. The little I knew came in small bits of information from my sister. When tragic circumstances brought his estate to me, I realized I had to know more. Armed with my mother’s urging and my own curiosity and longing for answers, I undertook to write Gia-fu Feng’s biography. After a thirteen-year journey, I find I have done so.”

Amber Lotus Publishing has been publishing the work of Gia-fu Feng and his artistic collaborator, Jane English, for nearly a decade. In addition to Still Point of the Turning World: The Life of Gia-fu Feng, Amber Lotus has also published Feng’s translation of Chuang Tsu: Inner Chapters.

Still Point of the Turning World: The Life of Gia-fu Feng will be released April 24, 2009.